Fluent Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of ANSYS, Inc., a global innovator of simulation software and technologies designed to optimize product development processes, today announced new releases of TGrid 4.0, GAMBIT 2.3 and 3Matic-for-Fluent 1.0, all major upgrades to Fluent’s preprocessing capabilities. These three products provide several new functionality advantages that enable Fluent users to proceed from CAD geometries to Fluent CFD solvers in unprecedented timescales.

TGrid 4.0 has been substantially improved, with a powerful Surface Wrapper added to its existing surface and volume meshing capabilities. Users can now wrap up multiple dirty geometry files from several sources into single, connected, high-quality surface mesh in record times. A number of automated functions are available to optimize the process, depending on the problem at hand.

The TGrid Surface Wrapper has reduced meshing times dramatically for a full range of industrial benchmark cases in the Automotive, Aerospace, Biomedical, Oil & Gas and Built Environment industries.

The 3Matic-for-Fluent software from Materialise Inc. is a complimentary conditioning module for converting hundreds of files from mixed geometry sources in native or standard CAD file formats (CATIA, UG, Pro/E, STEP, IGES), or in faceted formats (STL, WRML), into an optimal triangular meshing format for TGrid 4.0's new Surface Wrapper. This cleanup process ensures that each CAD part is fully connected, of minimal size, and with sufficient resolution to capture the underlying geometrical details. 3Matic-for-Fluent compliments TGrid 4.0 by allowing users to work more efficiently during the pre-wrapping phase of their preprocessing efforts.

Additionally, a comprehensive new set of CAD Readers in GAMBIT 2.3 allow users to bring native geometry into GAMBIT more effectively. For example, geometry operations like clean-up, construction, design modification and decomposition now work directly on all geometric representations. New, automated tools lead to significant improvements in meshing speed, quality and size distribution. Several enhancements in the areas of size functions, boundary layers, and hybrid meshing ensure that GAMBIT continues to be a leading CFD preprocessing software in the materials, chemicals, HVAC, power and process industries.

“Every user of Fluent’s preprocessing software will experience multiple benefits from these new releases. Several users have reduced the time needed for geometry and meshing task flow processes by an order of magnitude with these new tools. Preprocessing applications that used to take weeks are now being completed in a day. Our new preprocessing software delivers impressive industrial solutions to some of the most intractable meshing problems facing the Fluent user community, like underhood and engine geometries, HVAC design environments, biomedical passageways, oil drill bits, as well as many complex aerospace geometries, all within industrially relevant timeframes,” said Ferit Boysan, vice president and general manager, Fluids Business Unit at ANSYS, Inc.